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Congressional extremists not to blame for shutdown

In response to Bill Andrews’ Oct. 10th letter, I feel compelled to take issue with several of his stated positions. Andrews posits the “shenanigans of Congressional extremists” is to blame for the government shut down and that their “logic behind torpedoing the economy … is equivalent to the Vietnam strategy to destroy a village to save it.”

I was in the immediate vicinity of that Vietnam village during Tet, 1968 and it was quite simply the case. The village was being overrun and the defenders quite necessarily were required to virtually destroy the village to save themselves. This is not quite the analogy to the shenanigans of Democrat extremists who, to quote Nancy Pelosi, “have to pass the bill (Affordable Care Act) to see what’s in it,” unquote. One was a military necessity, the second was an act of hubris and arrogance which has foisted what one senior Democrat who helped devise ACA described as the ‘on-coming train wreck’.

Also Andrews fails to apparently that the give and take necessary for good governance requires both sides negotiate. He apparently believes that the separation of powers is good only if it separates the Republicans, Conservatives, tea party supporters, et al., from their legitimate complaints and places all of the power into the hands of one party, and particularly one individual who was elected to be president of all of the people and not a dictator whose ambition is to control every aspect of the lives of Americans.

He claims there is an issue with playing “chicken’ with the debt limit. False. The government takes in over $250 billion a month. Debt interest service is around $20 billion. That leaves around $230 billion to properly disperse. How do you do that? You service those things you are required under law. Social Security, Medicare and retirement programs already obligated. After that, it’s called having a budget. I remind readers there has been no federal budget for six years. Six years living from one continuing resolution to another simply keeping spending at the same level of the previous year adding a little for alleged inflation. No going back to zero-basef budgeting to see if a program is actually doing what it is supposed to do, if there are unnecessary redundancies which could be eliminated and if inflation is really a factor at all. I also want to point out the Republicans have submitted budgets all along, none of which have been considered by the Democrat-controlled Senate. Obama has submitted budget drafts, none of which have been accepted by a single member of his party. If it hadn’t been for the sequester, there wouldn’t have been any reduction in the rate of the growth of government at all.

As for the ACA? Andrews claims it was passed by Congress and signed by the president, ipso facto it’s the law of the land. Wrong. It was passed by Congress without a single Republican vote. So it was a particularly partisan bill. It was not read by virtually anyone because its size (2,000 plus pages) and has generated over 10,000 pages of implementing regulations. The ACA also was passed utilizing a “fine” if you didn’t participate. The law was immediately challenged and put on the fast track to the Supreme Court. The high court reviewed the law and stated it would be unconstitutional to “fine” a person for not participating in commerce; however, the government could use its taxing authority.

At that point the entire ACA should have gone back to Congress because the origination clause of the Constitution states all funding originates in the House. This might have given the ACA the chance for a studious debate and re-write; instead, it was passed as a “tax” in budget reconciliation again with no Republican support. If you listen today to the administration hacks who are promoting the ACA, the failure to participate is back to being a “tax penalty” or a fine meaning implementation is back to being unconstitutional.

Oh, and by the way. ACA is bad law. If it’s bad law it can be changed, so it is not “the law of the land.” The Alien/Sedition Acts, Slavery, Prohibition, Jim Crow, lack of women suffrage were all ‘bad laws’ which were changed. So simply stating ACA is the law of the land and therefore we should all just fall in line and obey is ridiculous and insulting?

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